The Influential Nonprofit Episode 87: Bailey Lewis: Digital Content That Puts People First
Bailey Lewis, founder of Words First Content Strategy, coaches leaders, teams, and professionals all over the world to cultivate a humans first approach to digital content practices and make their corner of the digital world a little better place for everyone involved, on both sides of the screen—all through the power of words.
The Words First approach to digital content strategy practices and processes is rooted in user experience and the psychology of human behavior in digital spaces.
This is the same approach used by the organizations responsible for the world’s best digital content experiences—the sites, apps, and digital spaces people want to visit again and again.
Bailey’s coaching methods teach leadership and teams to adopt this same approach and mindset for world-class results, swapping risk for reward and headaches for fist bumps in their digital content work.
Bailey is a longtime user experience, content strategy, and digital leadership expert. She’s an international writer, speaker, and coach with 1300+ professionals taught, 200+ teams coached, and 300+ digital projects led (and counting!). She’s known for her approach to words-first digital content transformation in the name of more human, intentional, joyful digital spaces everywhere.
Designing is the exciting part of creating a project for most people. However, when creating something, we’ve got to take into account primarily the words or the message we want to convey. We’ve got to answer these questions first: What are we saying to people on the other side of the screen? Why are we saying that? And why are we saying it this way?
We’ve got to break apart silos that separate the content writing team from the design team. When we let the writers use designing programs the team will end up with a blueprint for design.
You’ll know your strategy is successful when you manage to have your organization’s goals align with the audience’s needs, perspectives, and values. The only way to understand what your audience needs or wants is by directly engaging them as much as possible.
Make it easier for people who visit your site to navigate. Guide them through by emptying your mind of any internal mindset and just focusing on what the experience of going to your site would be for the uninitiated. Create digital spaces that are empathetic.
When the process is flipped to think about [words] first before design, it reduces a lot of risk - it actually swaps the risk for reward, and it makes the team's life a lot better, too.
If you get content professionals and writing professionals into a space where they can do more than just writing paragraphs or trying to make little notes about where stuff goes, then what you end up with is a blueprint for design.
Part of practicing people first, words first is having extreme empathy for the people on the other side of the screen to the point where you can kind of have an out-of-body experience, and put yourself really in their shoes - understanding the level of understanding that your audiences are coming in with.
Reach out to Bailey Lewis at:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dowordsfirst
Website: https://www.wordsfirstcontent.com/
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/wordsfirstcontent
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bailey-lewis-content-strategy-coach-consulting-training/
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